JD on EP

NYT writes of New Songdo City, a planned city being built on an island about 40 miles from Seoul, Korea. It will be built from the ground-up with processing integration -- your house key also serves as your wallet and transit pass. Key quote: "New Songdo sounds like it will be one big petri dish for understanding how people want to use technology."

WSJ has an op/ed on UN moves to claim control over the internet. Key quote: "In recent meetings, for an example, an EU spokesman asserted that no single country should have final authority over this 'global resource.'" (Me, I'd agree that "no single country" should control the net, but I'd agree even more strongly that no collection of countries should control it either. Set up the framework then get out of the way -- let individuals make their own choices, just so long as they don't hurt anyone else.)

Lycos is porting the Korean social network Planet Daum to a US audience. It's a creative site, where people can create audio slideshows via a Flash-based "MyTV" app. (I tried, but couldn't find a good link to a MyTV experience... can you help me check it out?) This will be a good test of how universal or culturally-bounded "Web 2.0" types of experiences are.

Open Source Flash website has had a revamp, looks good... Aral Balkan describes how he could really use a more functional debugger for HTML validators.... ;-)

Claus Wahlers lays out a roadmap for Deng 2.0, an amazing project to provide a "Modular XML Browser" for many of the W3C specs (CSS, XHTML, SVG etc) via the upcoming Macromedia Flash Player 8.5. One feature which particularly caught my eye was rendering support for a subset of XUL.

Google Mail is introducing auto-save... odd, that, I don't recall a prior case where your typing goes to someone else's server without you hitting "submit" (we've seen it stored locally, for sure)... after watching the blogosphere move more and more like a school of fish, I wonder when the implications of this will reach the A-list.

Stephen Collins writes of The ACME Guide, "a comprehensive guide to building a development workstation using Apache, ColdFusion MX 7, MySQL and Eclipse."

Steve from Del Ray offers a Goowy review, a SWF-based email client.

Richard Ziade wrote last week of "Why Microsoft Should Buy Adobe". Rich, you're killin' me here... after moving this blog's address from Blogspot to Markme.com to a Macromedia "go" address" to weblogs.macromedia.com, and soon presumably to some URL in the Adobe domain, you want me to then switch again to a Microsoft domain? How'm I ever going to take my rightful place in the Technorati 100 with all that address-switching, not to *mention* the boxes of outdated business cards I'll be carting around...!? ;-)

Sean McGrath at IT World had an essay tracing clientside interactivity from Java through SWF and (now that it can request data) JavaScript. He's got a cute zinger in there: "Javascript is, for large application development, about as appealing as building a space shuttle with spaghetti." His main point, though, is about translating programming code... write in Java, publish as JavaScript, eg. I'm skeptical... machine-translation is definitely possible, but I'm not sure how often it has been optimal communication... machines can help in getting the gist of someone else's idea, but they're not real good at making or optimizing ideas themselves.

Thomas Phinney of Adobe writes of the phaseout of Type 1 fonts, particularly in light of the upcoming Microsoft operating system. Includes two paragraphs of legal boilerplate.... ;-)

Ed Bott debunked yet another story which was more about the media than about reality, this time about Microsoft and a DVD format. Many of the highly-linked bloggers neither credit nor fact-check the stuff they run... I'm hoping we quickly evolve to a system where reputation is based on more than just longevity and social connections.

Alex Bosworth's LiveMarks project got blogged around again last week... it basically displays the ongoing changes to the del.icio.us outbound RSS inside a single HTML page, ajaxically... my first thought was concern that this might get too popular, and that it would draw the attention of viagra sellers and all the other spambloggers we're dealing with today.... :(

Nathan Weinberg has a roundup of reactions to Google's interface for scanning RSS feeds. I haven't tested it myself (I hesitate at adding new passwords and stuff), but I wonder whether some of the complaints are based more on familiarity with other RSS interfaces, than with problems about this particular interface. Mixed response from those who have invested time here.

Betaruce has changed servers to handle the demand for that "webcam detects your motion so you can wave your hands to move UI elements on screen" experiment unveiled last week... the more I think about using a webcam as a computer input device, the more I think there's something there....

I'm not sure who owns this page (I'm too lazy to WhoIs the site now), but it's a list of FLV players... not sure how universal the list is, but it seems a good resource.

The Mayomi Mind Mapper got linkage on a whole bunch of sites last week. It looks impressive, but I haven't yet set up an account to see what it actually does.

NetVibes is another project which looks interesting, but which I haven't been able to fully suss out yet.

Peter Elst had one of the posts which made a whole lot of us here in the shop feel good, thanks.... ;-)